I suspect that the story of my turn to atheism is less interesting than many. I did not have the dramatic crisis of faith that is so often described in the turn away from theism. This must stem from the fact that I began down this road as a small child.

My early experience with the church was much like the experience of most of the people I know. Sundays were a day where I was forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and go to a big place that smelled funny. It was full of old people who got very bent out of shape if you did not sit absolutely quietly for a whole hour! Then this other old guy in funny clothes would stand up in the front and drone on and on about whatever was on his mind. It was torture. The big payoff, though, was that if you behaved, you got to go out to eat afterward.

Despite myself, I still managed to pick up the basics. There was this guy who was really really powerful up in the sky somewhere who really really cared what you spent your time doing. There were all these stories about him, or more usually, about people interacting with him, that were just like the fairy tales my dad would tell when I was going to sleep. Stories about animals on a big boat and guys riding around in whale stomachs. For some reason, though, people seemed very concerned that you take these stories seriously and not the fairy stories–even though, I confess, I liked the fairy stories better. I was also aware that there were other kinds of people who believed the exact same stories but were not to be associated with if possible. They were called Baptists. Somehow, they believed the stories TOO much.

The turn didn’t come until one day in about the second or third grade. I was at the library in my school looking for a nice little book to hold me for the weekend. Usually, I would be on the lookout for some nice Garfield comics or perhaps some Clifford the Big Red Dog. That day, however, I found a story of creation that the Indians told. Honestly, I don’t remember the story or from which tribe it originated. It had to do with the Sun and the Moon getting together and making the Earth as their child… or something like that. It was a long time ago. In any case, what I remember most of all was my reaction to it. I thought, “How could anybody possibly believe that?!” That thought made me pause. “Wait a moment,” I pondered, “if that story sounds ridiculous, then what rational can I give to the story in the Bible? Why does everyone take THAT story so seriously?” I should point out that I grew up in the deep south. I had never met anyone who did not take the Bible seriously.

From there, it was a slow spiral into inevitability. From Christians, I got my first taste of what a horrible argument sounded like. I was in high school then. I said to some of the kids in Sunday school, “But you can’t really KNOW that the stories in the Bible are true.” I don’t remember what this was in response to, but they seemed shocked. Their reply was, “Yes, you can. It says so in the Bible. You just have to have faith!” I was shocked that anyone could say something so inane.

I remember sitting in church again, later on. I was bored. So, I decided to actually take a look at what all of the fuss was about. So, I picked up the Bible. They were liberally sprinkled about, after all. I suspected that this was to encourage us to read them. I started at the beginning. Genesis started out okay. I knew this story, after all. Then I came across one I hadn’t heard. It was about these two brothers named Cain and Able. They were the sons of Adam and Eve. Somehow, they had managed to get wives from somewhere. It didn’t really go into where exactly these females came from. I suspected I wasn’t supposed to ask. Anyway, they got together to buy presents for God. Able got something really nice that God liked. Cain gave something kind of mediocre. God was a bad liar and hurt Cain’s feelings, so Cain got all jealous and killed Able! WHOA!!! WHAT THE… Who reacts like THAT?! Talk about Christmas from hell! Anyway, the rest of the people (what other people?) were upset and figured they ought to punish Cain, but God said not to and gave him a NoNo mark instead. I guess that was supposed to have been sufficient, or maybe there weren’t enough people back then to start offing people for transgressions. I had thought this was supposed to be a GOOD book. It’s really not. I guess you could argue that it has really good parts, but then you don’t say it is a good book. You say it is a book that has its moments. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. “The It-Has-Its-Moments Book.”

My senior year in high school, I decided that the only rational position to take on the whole affair, considering the sheer number of available religious beliefs and the unknowabilities of their various faith claims, was one of “I don’t know what the truth is, so I’ll just have to find out when I get there.” I was prepared to wait for death to take me so that I might find out the truth. The truth, I decided, was more important than wishful thinking. I later found out that this was called agnosticism, so that’s what I called myself.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered the atheist community on YouTube. I read the books. I listened to the arguments. I reasoned that I was being unfair in my beliefs. I wasn’t really agnostic on the issue of whether or not Zeus or Thor were real. I didn’t believe for a minute that the Cargo Cults were a representation of reality. It was just the religion of my childhood that I was holding up a candle for. So, I abandoned it.

I am an atheist, because I recognize the value of the truth over faith. I recognize that the truth is not something that is landed on one day and held to vigorously. There is great value in bringing it slowly into focus as the facts come in. What you BELIEVE is the truth on one day may not in fact BE the truth. Evidence is the key.

I am an atheist, because I can find no reason not to be.

Nathaniel Logee

It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that god doesn’t exist.

Efilzeo
Italy

I’m a female of the species Homo sapiens on the eastern coast of the United States who was brought up in a sometimes vaguely deistic, sometimes atheistic, sometimes anti-theistic family.

It just depended on who you asked.

I’m the oldest child and was born in a major city on the northeastern coast of the United States. My father was brought up Catholic in Ireland, while my mother was brought up in the southeastern United States in a non-churchgoing family. I think she is a deist or agnostic-it was just never discussed. Both of my siblings are too young to have formulated any opinion on religion yet-they’ve not been brainwashed, so I think they’ll be agnostic at very least, but I’m not entirely certain.

My father was very different. He worked from a young age to make sure I knew that it was wise to stay away from the clergy, particularly Catholics. He instilled from a young age that talking to any priest or parishioner was a bad idea. I’m almost entirely certain that was from his rough upbringing with devout Catholic parents and nuns and priests at the schools.

Because of an unfortunate circumstance, my father lost his job while I was young and was forced to journey away to find work. Since then he’s had to take jobs that left him little time at home and what he had was usually spent sleeping. That meant that he didn’t have any time to discuss his atheistic beliefs with me and my mother has permanently refused to discuss hers with the family.

I eventually became a vague deist after I picked up ideas from my peers. There had to be somebody up there, right? While I was still in elementary school, I had a friend that, trying to be just like her preacher and her parents (who were active in the pursuit of converting people to their particular Lutheran strain of Christianity), converted me to a vague form of Christian-esque deism. I prayed in my bed at night to God (who, I would learn later, was also known as Jehovah), I learned about the Nativity and believed it, and I learned about Heaven and a diluted form of Hell. Bad people would go to timeout, good people would be happy.

I didn’t ever go to any church, I never really read the Bible until I was a lot older, I didn’t realize the exact qualifications to go to Heaven, I didn’t know that the God of the Abrahamic trifecta was a childish tyrant, I had barely any knowledge of the crucifixion and resurrection, I just had no idea. I guess I wasn’t ever really a Christian. I did believe in God in my own childish way, but it was filtered. I proudly told people (outside of my family) that I was a Christian.

It took me a few more years to realize that I didn’t know what I was getting into.

My converting friend had long since vanished into the past. At the time, I was taking piano lessons with a Southern Baptist woman who is (to put it mildly) extremely devout and committed-she had played the organ for her congregation since she was a teenager. She’d gone to a Christian college and converted people for some time. She knew my parents were non-theistic and I was a Christian, though I’d asked her not to say anything to my parents and I’d tell them when I was older and knew how to articulate my beliefs to them.

I had just finished a song and was looking for a new one. As I flipped through a book of pop songs of the last 50 years or so, I chanced upon a simplification of “Imagine” by John Lennon. I knew of the Beatles’ music and enjoyed it, though I hadn’t yet heard that particular song. Recognizing the name, I said, “Ooh, John Lennon.”

She replied, with a sort of satisfaction, “No, we don’t play that here. He wasn’t a Christian, but he learned his lesson in the end.”

At the time, the comment confused me, but I let it go without continuing the conversation. We drifted elsewhere, but I didn’t forget the comment. I thought that maybe he’d eventually converted.

I got home and searched for “Imagine” and for “John Lennon” on Google.

While listening to “Imagine” and reading John Lennon’s Wikipedia biography, I chanced upon the fact that he’d been shot and killed at a fairly young age, but he’d never converted. After I’d listened to “Imagine” twice, I made the connection in a stroke of brilliance.

She thought that John Lennon’s death was a judgment from God for writing that song.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore.

Now, she’s generally a nice woman, though obviously she holds no sympathy for atheists (or homosexuals, or Muslims) and she watches Fox News.

But this hate, I found as I finally read the Bible, was supported openly. The Old Testament was just a compilation of the evil of Jehovah-the New just a contradictory set of tales of the purveyor of an immoral doctrine that was supposedly simultaneously the son of Jehovah and Jehovah.

It was terrifying and laughable at the same time. But I also realized that the idea of this God, the idea of Hell, of original sin, of resurrection, of believing an old story book, of trusting the nonsensical and often contradictory doctrines of Christianity was just absurd, ludicrous, preposterous!

But, for some reason, I stopped there. I didn’t renounce deism, though I realized that an interventionist God was also absurd. I became something of a Ben Franklin-like deist; it (whatever it was) existed but it didn’t do anything.

Eventually, through a rather strange route, I started watching Dara O’Briain’s standup comedy. I laughed and laughed until I reached the part where he said he’d take psychics, homeopaths and priests and put them all in a sack and hit them with sticks. The psychics and priests I could emphasize with, but I didn’t know what homeopaths were.

The next stop was to James Randi’s YouTube channel.

I found Thunderf00t on YouTube shortly afterward.

After that, I stumbled across the Atheist Community of Austin and the Atheist Experience, followed shortly thereafter by the Non-Prophets.

And then I found Pharyngula.

From there, the whole world of atheism and anti-theism opened up.

Since then, I’ve been commenting on the intertubes, I’ve been joining chatrooms and I’ve been reading and educating myself about evolution, about religion, about society in general and anything else I can get my hands on. I’ve just gotten into one of my first written debates with a theistic friend of mine (verbal sparring has been going on for a while) and I’m having a blast.

Once I started educating myself and enjoying it…everything fell into place. I finally understood why I found the Bible so absolutely absurd. I finally figured out why my father was so anti-theistic. I finally figured out why people were protesting church-state separation violation. I finally figured out why calling Jesus a madman or something worse was justified. I finally figured out why the line between what is comforting to believe and what is true is so important.

I’m going to end with one of the only quotes in the Bible, otherwise known as the Big Book of Multiple Choice, that has ever held any significance for me. Predictably, it does not come from the Old Testament (though Ecclesiastes is interesting at very least) nor does it come from the supposed sayings of Christ. Instead, it is from Paul. Also predictably, I had to take it (somewhat) out of context.

1 Corinthians, 13:11-When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (KJV)

Fitting then, now that I am no longer a child, that I put away the childish god of Abraham, the childish reliance on imaginary friends, and the brutal yet still childish threat of pain that are all mainstays of the destructive and infantile organizations we call religions.

Xios the Fifth
United States

I was raised in a home that went to church 2-3 times a week – Protestant, Lutheran, Missouri Synod. I had a lot of questions about religion growing up, but always assumed that it was my own lack of understanding that caused it. One week prior to confirmation, my pastor allowed us to sit down with him and ask any lingering questions we had. By this time I had formulated an unsophisticated, old-earth creationism, 13 year-old version of my beliefs that attempted to meld what I learned in junior high with what I learned in Sunday school. First question for the pastor – What’s up with dinosaurs? Answer: There were dinosaurs on the ark. Second question – But the six days it took to create the universe weren’t really six days, right? Answer: It took six 24 hour days to do everything that Genesis says. At this point I realized that my pastor, the man that I trusted as much as my parents and teachers, would’ve failed 6th grade Science class. So I decided to take matters in my own hands. I read the Bible. That was a mistake. I came away confused and disgusted. I continued going to church for a few years after that, but I noticed that they always talked about the same stories from the Bible, and they glossed over the other half of the Bible, which is filled with some repugnant stuff. I read the Bible a second time when I was about 20, and from there I was convinced of its ridiculousness. I have been an atheist since.

Cory Cunico
United States

I’ve probably been an atheist my whole life. I wasn’t really raised in a very religious way. I got baptized, and had my confirmation when I was 14 years old. But still, I didn’t really believe that stuff. Confirmation was basically for getting money from my family.

But that doesn’t mean I never prayed.

Two years ago, when I was 16 years old, my father died – not suddenly, but slowly, because of cancer. This was not a pleasant experience. He had had cancer before, it was thought to be gone, then there was another tumor in his brain. Which caused a stroke, he was brought to a hospital, and then there he was, unable to move properly, unable to speak properly, completely helpless – which is terrible, but it was even worse for him. He never wanted to be dependent on somebody. But now he was. He still was completely conscious, he knew what happened around him. He could hear us talk to him, but he couldn’t reply properly. I could see how frustrating that was for him. I remember how we tried to understand what he tried to tell us, but ultimately we didn’t seem to get it. He tried to write it down, but there was no way we could read it. I remember when he was trying to tell me and my brother something, but still, we weren’t able to understand him. But then there was something we did understand. “Ihr seid doch so dämlich, ihr seid doch so unglaublich dämlich”, which roughly translates to “you are so dumb, you are so incredibly dumb”. When you could have seen his face, you would know how frustrating this was for him. He was angry, either at himself, or at us, or at the cancer. He was unable to speak with us, unable to say last words, unable to give last advice.

His condition got worse, and I don’t even know how long it was until he died. One month? Two months? When it finally happened, it was a relief. For him, and for all of us.

Why am I telling you this?

This was the time when I prayed. I prayed for a cure, for the radiation therapy to work, even when he got to the hospice, I prayed for a miracle. I probably didn’t really believe in God, but you try everything out, you cling to every glimmer of hope there is, however remote.

A day before his death, there was a priest with him, and he received the last supper. I was not there myself, but I wonder what he might have said.
“You’re going to Heaven, to a better place”?

Or “Do not be afraid, God is waiting for you”?

Is this a comforting thought? Anyway, why is the way to enter Heaven so painful, why do you have to suffer for so long? Why not just make him die now, why not help my father? Why does God not care?

I think that this was the thing that made me realize that there is no God. Definitely not. And even if there is, then he is not someone to worship, but someone to be repulsed of.

Some days before his funeral, the priest of our small city who was going to hold the funeral sermon was at our home. She asked questions about him, about his life, about what to say about him. My mother told her, and at the funeral, the priest basically repeated what my mother told her. Of course she did, what else could she say? But that made it clear to me: This woman did not know my father at all. She had no idea about who he was. And still, she acted as if she knew him, as if she actually cared.

When, some day, I’m going to die, I don’t want some stranger to talk about me. I want my family and friends to do that, people, who actually knew me.

Religious people don’t have a satisfying answer about why God allows so much pain and suffering. Either they say that God works in mysterious ways, which is basically admitting that they don’t have a fucking clue, or that it’s part of God’s divine plan (You can’t help but to wonder why an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving creator of the universe is unable to develop a plan that doesn’t require hundreds of millions of people to die to function). My favorite: In our confirmation lessons we discussed the issue, and after some weeks, we came to the conclusion: everybody has to decide for himself. Yea, great. I’m feeling much better already.

So, about one and a half years later, I discovered the splendid Astrodicticum Simplex blog of Florian Freistetter, which is the most known German science blog. Through him, I came to discover the awesome videos of Edward Current and Non Stamp Collector, I discovered The Thinking Atheist (from which I have some awesome T-shirts), I discovered your blog, Pharyngula, and later the Freethoughtblogs with Camels with Hammers and The Digital Cuttlefish (Bishops, And Pawns and What Would An Atheist Do? are so amazing, thank you for them!). I came to know Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, I bought God Is Not Great and The God Delusion, and through Florian Freistetter I discovered great science books (I can’t really name them all), and Carl Sagan and his Cosmos. These people showed me a lot about our world, and why it is so magnificent, and why it can be so without a god.

But I also discovered more unpleasant things. I discovered how women in Islamic countries are being treated, how atheists suffer from a lot of prejudice in America, what parents can do to children because of their religion, how there a people like Ken Ham who are able to ignore all evidence and live in their own illusory (6000 years old) world, and even teach these views on children. I read parts of the Bible and the Qu’ran, and found out that these are books filled with violence, far from being divinely inspired, written by God. I found out about just how ridiculous some religious beliefs are (two words: Noah’s Ark).
But the thing that probably shocked me most was Harold Camping. This man brought people (besides bringing them to give him all their possessions) to actually kill themselves. He inflicted a fear of something imaginary in them, so strong, they saw no other way to handle it but to kill themselves. And did he show any remorse? Far from it, he said that the 21st May 2011 was merely the date where humans on earth are to be judged, and the final end of the world is said to happen 5 months later, on 21st October, which is (from the time I write this) in exactly 12 days. I don’t have any hopes, we’re going to have the same thing again, that is, people willing giving up their whole life because of their immense faith, and people like Harold Camping who have no problem with exploiting this faith for their own benefit, walking over dead bodies, and just not giving a damn. And maybe he even isn’t just not giving a damn, maybe he thinks he’s doing something good. If he were real, his God would probably be proud of him.

That’s why I am an atheist, and why I oppose religion.

“We are all without god – some of us just happen to be aware of it.” ~ Monica Salcedo

Andreas
Germany